Yardbarker takes $1.5M to connect fans with athlete blogs
Yardbarker, a site that connects sports fans with their favorite athletes via their blogs and other news, has raised $1.5 million in a third round of funding, according to paidContent. Based in Emeryville, Calif., the company allows users to define their preferences — which athletes they want to follow, which sports interest them most — and delivers the requisite aggregated content.
In the last 24 hours, Los Angeles Dodger Matt Kemp posted a video featuring Snoop… Continue Reading
Expensify raises $1M for online expense reporting
Expensify, a startup that offers tools for expense reports that “don’t suck,” announced today that it’s now possible for companies to add a customized, branded version of Expensify to their own websites.
For example, Expensify used their new application programming interface (API) to build an Expensify application for Salesforce, so you can track your expenses through a CRM tool that you already use. That application is a finalist in the Salesforce Cloud Computing Challenge; the winner… Continue Reading
CoTweet raises $1.1M to help companies figure out Twitter
People make a lot of comments, questions and complaints on microblogging service Twitter about companies — if you’re well-known, I imagine it becomes hard to manage pretty quickly. That’s where a startup called CoTweet comes in, helping companies manage their customer relations on Twitter. The San Francisco company just opened the beta test of its service publicly, and also announced $1.1 million in a first round of funding.
Of course, it’s possible for a company to… Continue Reading
Yardbarker scores $634K to connect pro athletes with fans
Yardbarker, the blog aggregation site that allows fans to connect with their favorite professional athletes, has raised $634,000 of a targeted $660,000 round of securities. Based in San Francisco, the company allows readers to define preferences for the types of blogs and sports news they would be interested in — providing them with a customized digest of information every day from both athletes and popular sports writers.
It last raised money in April 2008, capturing $6… Continue Reading
UserVoice raises $800K for customer feedback systems
UserVoice, provider of online tools used to gather and organize customer feedback, complaints and product requests, has raised $800,000 in a first round of venture capital from Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, Accelerator Group, and several individuals.
Based in Santa Cruz, Calif., the company says it aggregates the data to show what customers want most, and to help developers prioritize the changes they make. When new features are rolled out, UserVoice allows sites… Continue Reading
Xobni raises $7M to battle Outlook’s email overload
Xobni, a plug-in that tries to improve email organization in Microsoft Outlook, has raised $7 million in a second round of venture financing.
Xobni’s most prominent feature is an inbox sidebar that shows profiles of people you’re corresponding with. By making related content (phone numbers, past messages, files exchanged, and more) immediately accessible, Xobni helps you avoid fruitless or time-consuming searches through giant piles of email; Microsoft founder Bill Gates (somewhat hyperbolically) called it “the next… Continue Reading
Social search product Aardvark: Yahoo Answers meets Twitter — but better
Public details have been scant about the social search product from The Mechanical Zoo, a company chock full of former Googlers that just announced it raised $6 million from August Capital and Baseline Ventures. But for the last three months, I’ve actually been a beta tester for the company’s first product, Aardvark.im.
It’s one of the best web applications I’ve seen during my year with VentureBeat.
The simplest explanation is Yahoo Answers meets Twitter — real-time, rapid… Continue Reading
Social search startup The Mechanical Zoo cages $6M
The Mechanical Zoo, a social search startup founded by a team of former Google employees, has raised $6 million in a first round of funding.
Like many other companies, such as Delver and AskMeGo, The Mechanical Zoo says it’s trying to tailor web search results to personal tastes by tapping into a user’s “social graph”. What does that actually mean? As the company puts it, the service will help users “identify the right person, among the… Continue Reading
HourTown raises $1M for small business scheduling
A new startup called HourTown is entering the crowded market for scheduling websites, and it just raised $1 million to improve its product and promotion.
We’ve been a bit skeptical about whether companies can get much traction in this area, even if they offer a smart, simple interface like newcomer Presdo. But HourTown targets a different audience, because it focuses on helping service providers — basically, small businesses ranging from doctors to yoga instructors — schedule… Continue Reading
More funding for document collaboration: DocVerse raises $1.3M
There already plenty of ways to share and edit documents online, but a startup called DocVerse may be preparing a better solution. The stealthy San Francisco company recently raised $1.3 million from Baseline Ventures, Michael Dearing and undisclosed angel investors.
John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer first reported the funding, which VentureWire also confirmed. Co-founder Shan Sinha told Cook that DocVerse “will help people collaborate with others on documents more easily and effectively than anything available… Continue Reading
Iminlikewithyou raises $1.5M for social gaming site
Iminlikewithyou, a startup that began as something close to a dating site and has become closer to a casual game portal and social network over time, has raised a $1.5 million second round tor expansion.
The New York-based company only features its own games on the site, and is based entirely in Flash. Co-founder Charles Forman has said that he based many of his ideas off South Korean sites.
We’ve written more about the company as part… Continue Reading
Sendori, monetizing domain names
updated
Sendori, a Silicon Valley based company that lets you bid for traffic from other Web sites, has raised an undisclosed first round of venture capital.
The site operates in an industry that has so far been quite shady, and it’s an improvement over some past practices. The funding news was first reported by Venturewire and SiliconTap (subscriptions required).
Here’s how it works. I might own Gamespot.com, but I’d also like to draw traffic from other sites, such… Continue Reading
Cake Financial tracks your stock portfolio, rates your performance
Cake Financial is a new service for helping any stock market investor better manage their own performance.
The San Francisco company lets you import all of your financial data from online brokerage firms into your Cake profile, then compare your performance against other investors using the service.
Cake shows you the historical performance of your portfolio going back as far as ten years, as well as monthly and yearly performance data. You can compare yourself versus friends… Continue Reading
Yardbarker raises another “large” seed round, for sports news site
Yardbarker, an Emeryville, Calif. company that runs a site aggregating content from sports bloggers, has raised another seed round of capital.
Yardbarker lets users rank the sports news they like — which pushes the best news to the top. We first covered the company after its August launch (scroll down).
The company wouldn’t disclose the size of the round, saying only that it was a “large” seed round.
It has since compiled feedback and created a new release… Continue Reading